Is Disk-on-Chip (DOC) support planned?

Is Disk-on-Chip (DOC) support planned?

[Joseph M Dupre (AVAB Inc.)]

Q: Is there any intent to incorporate Disk-on-Chip support within 
future releases of grub?

For a while there was a patch maintained by the Linux MTD developers 
(http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org) to enable GRUB to boot from a 
Disk-on-Chip (DOC) flash device.  The most recent patch was for grub-
2003-11-10.  There appears to be multiple dependency problems which 
makes using this patch today difficult.  (Specific versions of GCC, 
autoconf and automake are required to build).

If there was a DOC patch that worked with the curent grub CVS, would 
you consider incorporating it? 

- Joe

Re: Is Disk-on-Chip (DOC) support planned?

[Marco Gerards]

"Joseph M Dupre (AVAB Inc.)" <dupre@avab.com> writes:

> Q: Is there any intent to incorporate Disk-on-Chip support within 
> future releases of grub?
>
> For a while there was a patch maintained by the Linux MTD developers 
> (http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org) to enable GRUB to boot from a 
> Disk-on-Chip (DOC) flash device.  The most recent patch was for grub-
> 2003-11-10.  There appears to be multiple dependency problems which 
> makes using this patch today difficult.  (Specific versions of GCC, 
> autoconf and automake are required to build).
>
> If there was a DOC patch that worked with the curent grub CVS, would 
> you consider incorporating it? 

The patch you are talking about is for GRUB Legacy, this mailinglist
is about GRUB 2.

Personally I wouldn't mind such support.  Can you please describe what
this support means?  I assume it is just a filesystem that needs to be
supported?  I don't have the hardware, but implementing the filesystem
should be easy if someone can give me an image of a filesystem.

--
Marco

Re: Is Disk-on-Chip (DOC) support planned?

[Joseph M Dupre (AVAB Inc.)]

On 28 Sep 2005 at 4:07, grub-devel-request@gnu.org wrote:

> The patch you are talking about is for GRUB Legacy, this mailinglist
> is about GRUB 2.
That's right.  I would hope that any work I do now wouldn't become 
obsolete tomorrow.  Maybe the next day, but not tomorrow! 
 
> Personally I wouldn't mind such support.  Can you please describe what
> this support means?  I assume it is just a filesystem that needs to be
> supported?  I don't have the hardware, but implementing the filesystem
> should be easy if someone can give me an image of a filesystem.

The Grub Legacy DOC patch did a couple things: first at adds some 
configuration options regarding DOC support, most importantly an 
option to bypass the DOC boot code and boot "normally" by holding 
down the ctrl key while booting.  Secondly it contains code to create 
a firmware image of grub that is loaded into the "boot sector" of the 
DOC device. 

- Joe